


bifocal

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2013 [6]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Community: wishlist_fic, Disjointed, F/M, M/M, Multi, Sequel, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 14:58:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I try to avoid dealing with the aftermath of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/260751">The Weight of Water</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bifocal

**Author's Note:**

> reena_jenkins asked for _X-Men First Class, Charles/Raven/Erik, For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible. - Stuart Chase_  
>  \- This will make not even a lick of sense unless you’ve read The Weight of Water beforehand. I'm sorry, dear, I took artistic license with this one.

+

Sometimes, something moves in the corner of Jamal’s eye.

It’s a flicker, a flash of colour and movement, something alive where nothing should be.

Jamal feels something shiver up his spine, in those moment, something cold that settles in his lizard brain. Fear. Don’t look, it says. Don’t look. 

He doesn’t.

At night he dreams of a child, a little girl he’s never had. He and Carmen always wanted kids but… but… they never did. He dreams of a little girl with eyes the colour of fire and skin always hot to the touch. In those dreams he is terrified of her, of her freakishness. He doesn’t believe she is his daughter.

Awake he knows it’s all just stress, just the new job, those strange flashes he sees, sometimes. Their brightness reminds him of those dreams and he walks the house for hours on end, up and down the stairs, the hallway from one end to the other, past the bedroom, bathroom, study and the nurse-

He’s never had a child. He asks Carmen sometimes, and she always nods, agrees with him. Of course. 

There was never a fire-skinned child and the room they meant to turn into a nursery is still empty. There is no reason to go in there.

None at all. 

+

_Riza stands in the middle of the street and shouts at the top of her lungs._

_All around her, the shoppers keep pushing forward, unperturbed. None of them even flinch._

_None except for two._

_They are young, like her, dressed in rags, clinging to a street corner to keep from being swept away by the crowd. They heard her._

_She waves at them and they waves back and Riza is, for the first time in days,_ seen _._

_She weaves through the legs of the humans between here and there, greets the children with a little bow. “Hello,” she says and allows her eyes to flash aquatic turquoise. The vestigial fins behind her ears twitch and flutter, catching the sunlight golden-blue._

_The boy giggles, baring fangs at her. The girl, an older sister or cousin of the boy, snaps her fingers and produces a tiny tornado that spins on her palm for a second before fading to nothing._

_They nod in unison and the boy reaches out small hands. Riza meets him halfway, holding on tightly._

_It has been eleven months and nineteen days since anyone who isn’t like her has been able to see her, hear her, feel her._

_Eleven months and nineteen days since the humans stopped knowing Riza was ever even born._

_It gets lonely sometimes, but no-one hits her anymore and stealing food is a lot easier now. And then there are moments like this, when she finds others of her kind and the instant companionship that comes with them._

_“Hello,” she repeats, and the other two echo her._

_Hello._

+

Maggie frowns at the numbers in front of her. 

The town’s census is something that happens every year. She used to insist it’s just because the mayor thinks they don’t have enough work to do, but now....

She stares at the numbers, blinks, stares again. They don’t change. 

She goes through the files, the births, deaths, moves. She adds and subtracts and double checks, triple checks. 

She frowns and stares.

The numbers don’t change. 

There are twenty-three people missing from Wiltshire, England. Eighteen of them are children. 

She rises from her desk, files in hand, intent on finding the mayor, the police, anyone. There are twenty-three people missing and no-one has noticed. 

She spins on her heel, headed for the door and – 

“Oh dear, now I’ve forgotten what I was going to do.”

+

_“They say there are three people more powerful than anyone else in the world,” Klinge whispers, a kid tucked into each arm, half a dozen others curled up at her feet._

_Her hair, sharp as razor blades – it’s where she got her name from, Blade , weaves gently around her head._

_Their little colony numbers almost forty, these days, and most of them are awfully young. Klinge denies it, but she’s become their den mother._

_“They call them the Triad. Mind and Metal and their Queen, Mystique. And do you know what they did? They saved us all. Wanna know how?”_

_She pats one of the girls on the head, softly. Her brother, a kid of twelve, gangly and freckled, yawns. “They m’de us ‘nvisible,” he grunts, shuffling closer to the other puppies in the pile._

_“Yeah,” Klinge nods, smiling softly and tiredly. Her family didn’t reject her, didn’t cast her out. They loved her despite what she is and the day they stopped knowing her was the worst of her life. Her friend Frosch – Frog - though, he came running to her that day, laughing, shouting at the top of his lungs because it was the first day in memory that his old man didn’t threaten to kill him if he showed anyone his freakishness._

_She hates it, but she understands, more and more with each wounded, battered child they find along the way._

_“They did. And now the normals can’t hurt us anymore.”_

__Or see us. Or love us. __

_“No more shoutin’,” one of the littlest ones agreed, her breath fanning purple along Klinge’s forearm._

_“No more shouting,” she agrees, and keeps talking until the children sleep._

+

In the basement archives of the CIA, FBI, KSB, whatever agency you want, there are forgotten files.

Files with cobwebs thick enough to give anyone an allergic reaction, files at the farthest reaches of the cavernous rooms, water-stained and left to rot.

Some of those files were buried on purpose. Dirty deals, illegal handling of agents, people, assets. Political motivations. Blackmail. Extortion. 

Things no-one wants to ever see the light of day.

But some of those forgotten files are just that – forgotten. 

People walk past their shelves everyday and never try to look inside the boxes. Archivists shake their heads over the wasted storage space and never do a thing about it. Agents give the stacks and stacks of paper queers looks, read file names like _Codename: White Queen_ and shake their head at the weird-ass things the desk jockeys come up with. 

Then they blink and can’t quite remember what brought them down here in the first place. 

Weird.

+

_“Where you headed?” Sticks asks, leaning in the passenger side window, taking in the faces of the four people already inside the car. One of them is smoking a joint and blinking hazily up at her._

_“Where’s anyone headed these days?” the driver asks, waving a cloud of heavy smoke from his face._

_“New York?” she guesses. It’s not really hard. That fact that they can fuckin’ well_ see _her at all tells her enough about them to guess their destination._

_“Got it in one, sweetheart. You want on this ride?”_

_With a shrug, Sticks opens the door, drops into the empty seat. She turns toward the pothead in the back. “You got anymore of that?”_

+

In her dreams, Moira is on a beach. 

On that beach, the wreckage of a submarine and an airplane lie scattered in the sand. 

On that beach, there is blood and the smell of cordite in the air and Moira fears for her life. 

Moira has never been to that beach. She was taken off field work after that case with the… with the… the thing.

But she dreams of standing there, amongst the wreckage and looking at the familiar face of… she doesn’t even know his name. But she knows him, soft and sweet and the girl beside him, spun sugar and gold.

She was named for an animal of some kind.

In her dreams, Moira remembers a beach she has only ever seen on photographs that crossed her desk only once, before disappearing into the archives, where they were forgotten instantly.

In her dreams, Moira almost remembers a man called Charles, and his sweet, spunky sister.

_Oh dear,_ a voice like the echo of god mumurs into one of those dreams. _It never actually happened this way, Moira._

God knows Moira’s name. She shivers and the beach turns dark. _You never joined us on that day, although I see how you might have. Yes, yes. Perhaps…_

The voice stops itself. _Forget, Moira. Forget all of it. And sleep soundly._

Moira does. One does not disobey a god.

+

_“This is a fucking disaster,” Raven says, slapping papers down on Charles’s desk. She pulses with frustration and Charles soothes her without thinking, bleeding blue calm into her skull, where Erik already waits, catching her anger and siphoning it off, using it for the battle he is fighting a hundred miles away, against a group of mutants that do not like the way the world is now._

_Charles monitors him closely, finds no real danger in the few opponents and leaves Erik to his fun._

_“What?”_

_The words spoken out loud are purely a farce._

_He already knows. The numbers pouring in the front gate every day, the tents on the yard, the tribes and clans forming within them, the adoration and fear that slaps Charles in the face every time he turns his thoughts outward._

_The way they – he – they – changed the world and how, somehow, that seems to have made it_ theirs _._

_“At this rate,” she mutters, flicking between shapes in her annoyance, “we’re gonna need a damn island to house everyone.”_

__That, _Erik thinks from farclosehere,_ might not be a bad idea _._

+

Don’t look behind you. 

Don’t flinch at the draft from nowhere. Don’t believe in the whispers you almost, almost hear, that something moving in the mirror.

There is nothing there. Don’t wonder about the empty room at the end of the hallway, the empty chair at your table, the hole in your heart where it feels like something was ripped from you. 

There is nothing there and there never was.

+

_Don’t look behind you. Don’t scream at people who can neither hear nor see you, anymore. Don’t hold on to what is lost._

_Don’t mourn._

_Don’t be afraid anymore._

_Don’t stop running because at the end of the road, Mind and Metal and their Queen are waiting and with them, the world they will make from the ashes of the old one._

+

Don’t look behind you.

+

+


End file.
